


Once More Unto the Breach

by SylvanWitch



Category: Generation Kill, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: His Last Vow Spoilers, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Relationship, discussion of serious injuries, post-GK
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 09:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1260817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...or close the wall up with our English dead.</p><p>Captain John Watson meets Gunnery Sergeant Brad Colbert for the first time in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, when Brad's life has just started to unravel.  The next time they meet, at St. Bart's in London, it's Doctor John Watson who's coming apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once More Unto the Breach

**Author's Note:**

> This time last year, I was spending more time in Afghanistan in my head, writing "A Road Too Far," than I was spending time in my real life. Apparently, I'm nostalgic for the bad old days. When I got the yen to break my _Sherlock_ cherry, the first person who started talking to me was John Watson, circa Helmand. The second person was Brad Colbert. Go figure. 
> 
> In terms of the timeline, the first part of this story is set in the summer of 2009, when the British forces in Afghanistan were undertaking Operation Panther's Claw (seriously, who names these things?). In July 2009, the US Marines start their own operation, Operation Khanjar. I've taken liberties with many things to bring these two men together. 
> 
> The second part of the story is set immediately following the scene in "His Last Vow" in which Sherlock confronts John with John's assumptions about Mary, after it has been revealed that Mary is an assassin. I've taken liberties with St. Bart's, too.
> 
> For the purposes of this story, Brad Colbert is a fictionalized character from the 2008 HBO mini-series _Generation Kill_. Nothing is implied or intended to apply to any real persons, living or dead.
> 
> This one goes out to all the medical personnel who hold our men and women together as they sacrifice their lives and confront their deaths. We're always alone at the end, but for many of these soldiers, they have a hand to hold until it's over.

**June 2009.  Helmand Province, Afghanistan.**

The wind was an assault, the sun a bludgeon, striking him full in the face.  He was fumbling for his sunglasses, one shaking hand held over his eyes, which were blurred by exhaustion and the perennial airborne sand, when he ran into someone hard enough to force him back a staggering step.

Captain John Watson dropped his hand from his face and squinted, feeling the hot tears start from his sore eyes and track down his already dusty face.  It didn’t matter that he’d been in surgery for hours—days, it felt like—where he’d been sterile and masked.  Once he’d stepped outside, he’d been exposed.

Helmand was like that; it left an immediate mark on you that never seemed to wash away.

“Sorry, mate,” he muttered tiredly, trying to see whom it was he’d bowled into.

Tall.  Fair-haired.  Deeply tanned face punctuated by cool blue eyes that evaluated John thoroughly in a matter of seconds.  It was the kind of calculated assessment that usually came from spooks and Special Forces.

“No problem, doc,” the tall man drawled, which was when John realized he was American, something he couldn’t have discerned for certain from the filthy, nondescript digital camouflage the man was wearing.  Where there should have been patches and insignia there were only the fuzzy blanks of empty Velcro backing.

Special Forces, then.  Marine, if John had to guess, but he was too tired for speculation and too heartsick to care.

How many such men had he held together in the past thirty-six hours, the red rivers of their blood carrying their lives from them as John had tried in vain to dam them up?

Still, this was the Camp Bastion field hospital, and it belonged to the British Army.

“Aren’t you a little too far south?” John asked, indicating his meaning with a vague gesture in the direction of Camp Leatherneck to the northwest.

 The man nodded.  “I’m visiting a friend.  He was brought in yesterday.”

“Name?” he asked, wishing almost immediately that he hadn’t when the American answered, “Private Llewellyn Edgar,” and John had a flash of bloodied ginger hair and sightless green eyes being gently closed by the gloved fingers of a surgical nurse.

Something must have showed on his face, for a spasm of feeling passed across the American’s face, so fleetly that John would have missed it if he hadn’t been expecting it, the inevitable, instinctive flinch of loss even the hardest of them hadn’t quite overcome.

“I’m sorry,” he said then, wearily, hating the sound of it, how he’d had to repeat it so often, how he meant it and almost wished he didn’t.

It would have been easier if John had stopped caring.  Easier and infinitely more awful.

The American gave a tight nod of acknowledgement, swallowed visibly, and offered a rough, “Thanks.  I’ll just…” trailing off and turning away.

“Tell me about him?” John caught himself saying before he’d even processed the thought that had prompted his words. 

John had been there long enough to have learned to prefer his patients anonymous.  That’s what he’d told himself, anyway, that it was easier not knowing who they’d been.

But the truth was, it sometimes helped to know the boys who’d died with his hands inside of them.  There was something so intimate about the process of bearing witness to their fleeing lives, so profound and powerful in feeling the last beatings of their desperate hearts. 

Somehow, knowing Llewellyn Edgar had loved horses and football and a girl named Sally made it both easier and harder to grasp that he’d been reduced to a vessel so violated that it could no longer hold life.

The American shrugged, and John fell into step beside him.  Though he was taller, his gait was slow, whether accommodating John’s height or carrying a weight of his own exhaustion, John couldn’t be sure.

The mess was mostly empty, the midday meal having finished, scent of chipped beef and toast still lingering, along with the ubiquitous odor of burnt coffee, which drew the American like a fly to a pool of blood.  John, of course, went to the tea station, fixing a cup as strong as he could make it, wishing they had the biscuits he liked and then feeling guilty for the thought.

They settled on either side of a long, plastic table that had been swiped with a sour rag.  The thin smell of ammonia and dishwater rose from the damp surface, but he ignored it easily. 

“Gunnery Sergeant Brad Colbert, USMC,” the American said, offering his hand for a firm shake.

“Doctor John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, RAMC,” he answered with a drifting smile.

“To absent friends,” John said, raising his mug.  Colbert responded with a sardonic tilt of his own mug, and John took a moment to look him over, noticing for the first time that Colbert’s right cheek was peppered with tiny black dots and he had nasty gash over his left ear, black blood having congealed in the delicate shell of it.

“Glass?” he asked, nodding to the scabbed wounds.

Colbert nodded.  “IED.  Yesterday.”

“You were with Edgar?” John couldn’t help the surprised note in his voice; as far as he’d understood, the US Marines weren’t active in Helmand yet.  That operation wasn’t slated to begin for another two weeks.  As a surgeon, he wasn’t privy to specifics, but he’d been read in on the increased likelihood of casualties after the second operation began.

Colbert’s shrug was noncommittal, his expression neutral.

“Right.  You’d have to kill me, then, wouldn’t you?” John said.  Even his smirk felt tired.

Colbert’s answering smile was a cold ghost dug up out of a shallow grave, but it still stripped years from his face.  It gave John a pang to realize that the man sitting across from him was younger than he, perhaps by as much as a decade. 

Then again, Edgar had looked like he should have been revising for A-levels, not manning an LMG.

“He was a good kid,” Colbert said without preamble.  He wasn’t looking at John at all, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, where some scene only he could see traced a faint smile on his chapped lips.  “Liked soccer.  Dogs.  Talked about his girl a lot.  Sarah.  Brown hair, blue eyes, big,” Colbert made the universal sign for a well-endowed woman, and John managed an appreciative nod.

“He wasn’t supposed to be in the lead vehicle,” Colbert said after a pause.  “It happens that way.”

John guessed that it probably did.  People died in accidental and ridiculous ways all the time.  You take the 8:15 instead of the 7:54 and wind up in a derailment.  You cross the street just as a cab’s brakes give way.  You happen to be at the Tesco when some yob with a bomb and a grudge turns you to gravy.

War just made it more obvious that death lived at the intersection of coincidence and superstition.

Wear your helmet this way.  Carry a pendant in that pocket. Kiss your mum’s picture before you climb into your seat.

Don’t ride in the lead vehicle on a dawn patrol.

“Did you know him long?”  John knew better than to ask, knew that that sort of question led only to truly tragic answers, but he couldn’t help it.  There was a deep, cold place in Colbert’s eyes that needed delving.

Those cold eyes met John’s then with a searching look that made John hold his breath.  He felt stripped naked in a scything wind, the other man’s regard as harsh as stinging sand against his exposed skin.

“I met him when he was in upper school.  I was on loan to the Royal Marines.  We did a good will tour of some London schools.  He came up to me after and asked how he could join up.  He couldn’t have been a hundred pounds soaking wet.  Near-sighted.  Wheezing.  I told him he was out of luck but that the Army might be hard up enough to take him.  When we left the school, he was waiting for me.  Told me I was a ‘fucking American arsehole’ and what did I know?”  Colbert laughs then, short and sharp, a sound like pain escaping against his will.

“I was right.  Marines didn’t want him, but the Army took him on.  When he joined, he made it a point to track me down.  Sent me an email with a picture attached—him in uniform with his girl.”

“I didn’t see him again until a couple of months ago, when he looked me up at Leatherneck.  I said, ‘Guy might think you were sweet on him, the way you keep stalking me.’  He told me to fuck off.  It was that kind of thing.”

Colbert made the last observation in shorthand, and John did, in fact, understand it.  The Americans were no more or less likely than his own people were to indulge in homoerotic brinksmanship, playing chicken with how far they’d go, how much they could get away with before someone got uncomfortable and called them names for real.

Something slid off of Colbert’s face fast enough that John could have imagined it—should have had the good grace to pretend he had imagined it, in fact—and he understood suddenly the subtext of Colbert’s grief.

“Did you love him?” he asked quietly, knowing better, waiting for Colbert to stand up and lay John out with one righteous blow.  He’d have it coming.  He was violating at least eight rules of the unwritten soldier’s code by asking.

Colbert’s smirk was ugly and self-directed.  “It wasn’t like that for me. Edgar was.  But I…”  He shrugged, retreated behind a neutral expression that suggested he could be calculating bullet trajectory or the temperature of his coffee or the fragile state of a young man’s confused heart.

“I’m sorry,” John said for the second time that day.

“Me too.  I wish he’d never met me.”

“If not you, then someone else,” John said.  “In my experience, if a young man wants to go to war, there’s no one who can stop him.”

Colbert seemed to think about that, a series of indefinable expressions crossing his face.  Then he nodded and made to stand.  “Yeah, I guess you’re right, doc.  Anyway, I should be heading out.” 

John rose, too, picking up their mugs, dumping the tepid liquid into the dregs pot, and stacking the used mugs in the bins intended for that purpose.  He didn’t linger over the task, but he somehow knew that when he turned around, Colbert would be gone.

He was alone in the mess when he headed for the door himself and the too-bright world beyond its swinging door.

 

**2013\.  St. Bart's Hospital, London, England.**

  
John came through the swinging door from the ER into the wide corridor beyond it and staggered into one of the ubiquitous yellow plastic chairs that seemed to multiply in hospital hallways.  His knees, locked for so long in stubborn refusal to bend, betrayed him now to gravity’s ungentle care and the legs of the chair screech loudly against the lino floor as he slumped into it.

“You look like shit, doc.” 

John somehow dredged up the energy to search out the American voice that had delivered the laconic observation.

A familiar face, older but cleaner, both more and less marked by the ensuing years, greeted John’s look.

“Colbert?” John managed.  He wasn’t surprised to have remembered; his mind had gone back to their mess hall conversation at least a dozen times in the four years or so since the two of them had shared cold comfort on a scorching hot day in the middle of hell.

He also somehow wasn’t surprised to find Colbert there.  Another hospital.  Another day.  Another terrible violation of the flesh.

Another hell, this one more personal for John, and that should sting, that observation.  Boys dying with his hands in their guts should be personal, but this…

He tore his mind away from Sherlock, the sound he’d made as he’d been helped onto the gurney, the way he’d gone willingly into the hands of the EMTs, and John’s treacherous wife, the woman who’d shot Sherlock, sitting rigid and pale in the client’s chair in 221B.

John was startled to realize he’d left her sitting there, following the EMTs out with only the tersest of words to Mrs. Hudson.

“Doc?”  It was a cautious interrogatory, the kind that invited John to answer or not.

“My friend’s been shot.  Well, he was shot a few days ago, but he let himself out of the hospital, and then it was too much.  Of course it was too much!  It’d be too much for anyone, really.  He overtaxed himself, and then collapsed, and his heart stopped twice on the way here.  They don’t know if—.”

John caught himself rambling, eyes fixed on a scuff on the wall three inches or so above the bottom molding.  He can’t look at Colbert, who had settled beside him, leaving an empty chair between them.

He ran a hand over his face, trying to wipe away some of the exhaustion, and ignored the sick roiling in his stomach whenever he thought about Mary.  He couldn’t think about her.  He couldn’t _think_.

He must have spent a little time not-thinking because the next thing he knew, there was a hot beverage cup hovering in his line of sight, and when he looked up, Colbert was standing there with one of his own.

“It’s probably awful, and I don’t know how you take it, but I thought you could use some coffee.”

“Ta,” John said, raising the cup to drink from it without regard for how hot it might be.  The coffee stung his lips and numbed his tongue with burning, but he swallowed a scorching mouthful, the pain bringing tears to the corner of his eyes, which he just managed to dash away, clearing his throat and squaring his shoulders against the wall behind his chair.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” John said after a tense few minutes of quiet.  As observations went, it was fairly lame, but he could be forgiven for it, and Colbert took it as offered, a way to make conversation.

“I have a friend in the long-term care wing.  This is the first time I’ve visited him.  Got a little lost on the way out.”

John snorted at that.  Bart’s _was_ the sort of place even a Special Forces bloke could lose his way. 

“Are you still in the Marines?”

Colbert nodded.  “I’m on leave, thought I’d look up some of my mates from my Royal Marine days.  Pendergast was wounded in Kandahar.”

John felt his mouth tighten reflexively.  “Bad business, that.”

“A fucking goat rodeo,” Colbert concurred.

“How’s your friend?”

Colbert shook his head, a short, jerky motion.  “Paralyzed from the neck down.  Can’t talk, breathe on his own, feed himself.  He blinks, though.  One for no, two for yes.”  He took in a long breath, crumpled his empty cup in his hand.

“I’m sorry.”  It seemed to John as though those two words made up the majority of his conversations with this man.

“Me too.  He used to love to run.  Fastest guy in the unit.  And he’d do these impersonations that would make you laugh until you puked.  Graham Norton.  Dame Judi Dench.  John Cleese.  It’s a fucking waste.”

John tried not to imagine what might happen if Sherlock didn’t recover, if he’d gone too long without oxygen to that brilliant, beautiful brain.  If he ended up on a respirator, blinking out his days.  He crumpled his own cup, forgetting that it was still half full, and the liquid sloshed over the bent edges and dripped onto his hand, onto the floor.

Colbert took it from him without a word, throwing it out with his own, and sat back down.  John wiped his damp hand on his wrinkled pants.

“I saw Edgar’s girl this morning.”  He spoke as though he wasn’t expecting a response, which was a good thing because it was beyond John.  Not that he didn’t remember Private Edgar—he remembered every boy, man, and woman who’d died under his hands—but that he couldn’t have found anything to say.  He was empty, a bitter wind ripping through him, carrying only dust.

“She’s doing okay.  Got another boyfriend.  Says he’s ‘The One.’  She acted like she wanted my blessing, so I gave it.  How fucked up is that, me, of all people, acting as Edgar’s proxy when we might have—.”  He seemed to remember himself then, remember place and time, but the admission had caught John’s attention.

“You’d said once that you weren’t interested in him that way.”

Colbert shook his head.  “He was too fucking young.  Besides, I’m a Marine.  And at the time…”

Right.  John remembered reading that the Americans had finally struck down one of their more pernicious and vicious laws regarding homosexuals in the military.

“But now you think you might have…”  John left it go, but Colbert nodded, looking older than he had only minutes before.

“I think we might have.  I’ve come to terms with some things since then.”

“Ah,” was all John said, but he understood.  He was just now himself coming to terms with a similar few things.

“Your friend…is he…?”  Colbert left it open for John to pretend that he didn’t know what they were talking about.

“He’s not.  That is, we’re not like that.  Quite.  But I think we might be.  Someday.  If Sher—if he lives.”  The last word came out so low and rough, he wasn’t sure Colbert had heard it, but he must have, because he leaned over just then and touched his shoulder, not exactly a punch, more like a friendly nudge with his closed fist.  It rocked John a little in his seat, rattled a long breath out of him, as if he’d been holding it all that time.

“He’ll make it.  He’s a strong man.”

“How do you know that?”  John isn’t surprised, exactly.  He’s spent too long around Sherlock to be shocked by sudden prognostications.

“He chose you, didn’t he?  You once told me if a man wants to go to war, there’s very little that can stop him.  Seems like you’re still at war, doc.  And he’s with you, right?”

John closed his eyes against it, a sense that he was drowning, that Colbert’s words had opened a dam and the mess of things it had held back, all the dark and ugly parts of him, all the blood and guts and screaming, the violin twilights and the sleepless nights and the grey dawns with burnt toast and Mrs. Hudson’s tea—all of it poured out of him until his breath was catching in swallowed sobs and Colbert was sitting next to him, shoulder to shoulder but otherwise not touching him, and John was being anchored by that single point of contact as the flood swept around him, trying to pull him under.

When he felt the last eddy of emotion ebb away, John straightened and wiped his face with his hand and looked at Colbert in profile, seeing the eyes fixed politely to the far wall, the shoulders squared like a soldier, the feet flat to the floor, hands curled over his knees, like he was listening to a mission briefing and not holding a fellow warrior together.

“Do this a lot, do you?” he asked, trying for levity.

“Some,” Colbert answered, producing a card from his back pocket then and holding it out.  “Call me, doc, or drop me a note.  Any time.”

John nodded, moved again beyond words.  “Thank you,” he said at last, though it was a strangled, almost unintelligible, utterance.

“I’ve got to get a move on, but maybe I’ll see you again?”  Colbert stood and turned toward John, who levered himself with some effort out of the chair.  He was stiff, back and shoulders tight with tension, and he felt robotic when he put his hand out to shake Colbert’s.

“I’ll be here,” John said, indicating more than the hospital or London.

Colbert smiled, a broad, warm smile that lit up even the cold blue of his eyes.  “I’d like that,” he said, turning to leave.

John watched him go, standing lost in the center of the hospital corridor until long after Colbert was out of sight, until a nurse brushed by him with a meds cart and he realized he was in the way.

He couldn’t bear to resume his seat, so he moved back through the ER doors, seeking a nurse who would tell him something about Sherlock, swallowing dread and hope in equal doses as he tracked down his quarry.

A doctor was just emerging from an examination room with a chart in his hand, and when he saw John coming he said, “Dr. Watson?”

John nodded numbly, unable to speak, to ask the question the answer of which he was most terrified to hear.

“Mr. Holmes is going to be fine.  He made a mess of his stiches and undid some of our hard work, but we’ve got him stable now, and as soon as a surgery becomes available, we’re going to take care of the bleeding.  Barring complications or infection…  Well, I don’t have to tell you how it goes, do I?”

“Thank you,” John stammered, feeling his knees giving way once again.  “Can I see him?”

“Of course.  Just don’t spend too long.  He needs his rest.”

“Thank you,” John repeated, moving toward the room, hand on the door before he paused to consider what he’d say to the man inside.

Then, remembering what Colbert had said about war, John squared his shoulders, pushed the door open, and went once more into the breach.

A man could only expect so many second chances, after all.


End file.
